By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to actor turned director Zach Braff’s 2004 hipster comedy Garden State, starring Braff, Natalie Portman, and Peter Sarsgard.
“What I really want to do is direct!” Oh, if The Butcher had a dollar for every time he’s heard this asinine comment spring from the lips of a typically over reaching actor not content with being paid millions to prance around in front of a camera for a living. When it’s said by an actor with something of a track record – even if it’s a self-important drip like Edward Norton or Sean Penn – we’ll listen.
But when a move behind the camera is suggested by an actor whose best work prior has featured on a crap medical-based sitcom, you know that you’re in trouble. Thus, when Scrubs star Zach Braff made his directorial debut with Garden State, we knew that we were in for something pretty bad. The horrors that awaited, however, were far more intense. Sure, this terrible flick is a little forgotten today (thank fuck!), but upon its release, the cognoscenti couldn’t get enough of Zach Braff’s schtick.
Like a high school nerd desperate to prove that he’s actually cool, Braff goes into “hip indie” overload with his film, peppering it with so many self-consciously quirky moments that it becomes insufferable after about five minutes.
Braff plays the dopey Andrew Largeman, a wannabe actor who heads home to New Jersey when his mother kills herself. While dealing with his nasty father (notorious ham Ian Holm), Andrew falls for gorgeous local girl Sam (Natalie Portman), perhaps the most contrived and absurdly idealised female character in the history of modern cinema…the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or whatever. More masturbatory fantasy than an actual character, she joins Andrew on his tedious tour through the places and people of his youth, with one pretentious scene following another.
A surreal scene with Method Man as a sleazy hotel worker? A millionaire who’s made his money through the invention of “silent Velcro”? Loads of prescription and non-prescription drugs? Whoa, how cool!
And then there’s the soundtrack. Like a mix tape (remember those?) made for you by a friend not out of kindness but rather as a means to show you how much hipper they are than you, it’s an absolute nightmare of too-cool-for-school dross.
“What I really want to do is direct!” Gee, who’s next…Joey from Friends?
